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Polyester

Synopsis

Filmed in ODORAMA

A suburban housewife's world falls apart when her pornographer husband admits he's serially unfaithful to her, her daughter gets pregnant, and her son is suspected of being the foot-fetishist who's been breaking local women's feet.

God bless John Waters. Even his relative move into the mainstream is filled with abortion talk, Moral Majority parody, throwback '50s hooliganism, Medici-level intra-family scheming for power, and more. Divine is just wonderful as the frumpy housewife trying to keep a lid on her hell family's mania.

The films of John Waters are definitely some of the most bewildering there are. The 70's spawned a lot of different directors around the world, and Waters was one of them, making the raunchy and trashy "Pink flamingos". Polyester is not as 'filthy' as the latter, but maintains that strange style that Waters goes for with his films.

It is good that he lessens down the scale of nudity and disgusting imagery, and tries to balance the film out more as just a wild comedy, and that is what it is. The story follows a housewife (Divine), whose married to a pornographer and her children are off the chain, with her son becoming known for breaking women's feet in the…

I am kinda glad I didn't have the odorama card. I wouldn't've been able to resist scratching and sniffing it, and I know I would have regretted it. John Waters nails the satire of suburban life, taking his ramped up, twisted, campy look at it and turning it into a weirdly scathing homage.

With the help of talented cinematographer David Insley, Polyester feels like the moment in which John Waters's mad, trashy insanity gatecrashed its way into a proper film. And the shock is that it works, with the movie barely feeling like a dilution of the director's style at all, even if the content is notably tamer than usual. Divine (who else?!) stars as alcoholic housewife Francine Fishpaw (great name!), who has to suffer a cheating, pornographer husband, a psychotic, foot-stomping son, and a slutty daughter. Yet it's Edith Massey who steals the show as Francine's friend Cuddles, a former cleaner who's living it up thanks to a massive inheritance. Massey's unique style of "acting" contrasts beautifully with the slick look of…

I'm a huge, huge John Waters fan, but I've never dug Polyester all that much for some reason. I rewatched it tonight, having not seen it for many years, at a cinema, and yes, with the infamous Odorama card. Perhaps it was watching it with a crowd, or the anticipation of the Odorama numbers, but I loved the shit out of Polyester this time around. I always looked down upon Polyester as being awkwardly stuck between the hysterical early filth from Waters and his more mainstream efforts that followed. I obviously had not fully appreciated just how hilarious and sick the suburban satire of it is. The screaming nuns taking pregnant girls on a hayride, the foot stomping, Divine's insanely…

The oddball characters and preposterous plot exude no charm, only serving to bore and confound. The movie is firmly rooted in the early 80s and a lot of the humour just doesn't resonate to a first-time viewer in 2014. I feel as though Waters conceived of the Odorama gimmick before he had any vague idea of the narrative. Odorama was not an appendage of the film; the film was an appendage of Odorama. I'm really disappointed by this film, seeing as I loved Pink Flamingos, the only other Waters film I've seen.

John Waters tried to parlay his shrewdly developed media image as the master of bad taste into mass-market success with this 1981 parody of the suburban melodrama of the 1950s, but the transition from underground to aboveground took its toll: this is a rather tame exercise, even with the nasal affront originally provided by Waters's “Odorama.” Waters shot in 35-millimeter here for the first time and got a more polished performance than usual from his perennial star, Divine, but the heightened professionalism doesn't serve Waters's slapdash, sophomoric wit all that well: the film is too slick and knowing for its own anarchic good. Tab Hunter joins the Waters regulars and pitches in, wholeheartedly, with their enthusiastic overacting; he's really not bad, which tends to spoil the nasty joke of the casting.

Having watched Serial Mom just the other night, I was a little underwhelmed with how tame some of it was. So I thought what better way to really show my gf what John Waters was all about than by showing her Polyester - a film that, tonally, is treading similar ground to the last one we watched.

We didn't have the odorama cards, but the film was still fun just trying to imagine how bad the smells would be.

Polyester is, in a nutshell, a suburban nightmare. Essentially, Devine plays a frumpy housewife who's having quite possibly the worst month of her (or anybody's) life. Her obnoxious pornographer husband leaves her for a total slag, her mother is trying to…